In 1935, I was in grade school living in Haiku. My father would take us to Lepo Lepo or, as we learned in 1941, Kihei. It was called Lepo Lepo because it was a dusty place where the thick and hard-to-breathe air swirled from the dust storms.
Today, I live in Makena. Within two days after washing the white stone floor on the decks, there is a layer of dirt. If the cane covering the land from Puunene to Omoapio and toward Kula was no more, it would be much worse and the dust would swirl as it did in 1935.
Don't complain about cane burning until you read the Maui chapter of "Six Months in the Sandwich Islands" by Isabella Bird. She describes in detail what it was like before cane was planted from Wailuku to Haiku. She describes the isthmus this way: "Looking down upon it from Haiku, you can see nothing all day but the dense brown clouds of a perpetual sand-storm."
Do we want that? Will we then wish we had the cane back? Other replacement crops have been suggested but they require more frequent harvesting than cane, which is about every two years.
I respectfully suggest that if you don't like the cane smoke move to Haiku, Makawao, Kula or even Hana and continue to enjoy clear views without dust storms - as long as cane is still a Maui crop.
Nobuo Suda
Makena
